Blue Love

I've not made much progress on my version of Cherie Amour:

I've had a stonking cough for about a week but have managed to avoid taking time off work. My knitting hasn't been picked up much as dropping stitches in a coughing fit would not help me relax. I'm really enjoying the Cherie Amour pattern so far. It has columns of purl stitches in the lace pattern which really help me orientate myself in the lace and locate mistakes easily, making it a good beginner lace pattern. The chunky yarn and big needles mean that when I do put half an hour into it I make visible progress.

Hopefully I'll make more significant progress in the next couple of weeks!

Yum yum yum

This is one of my favourite suppers:

It's a savoury bread and butter pudding.

This recipe makes enough for supper for me and MrK and we're greeeeedy. It would serve 3-4 with a side of some sort (baked potatoes maybe?). I make it in a lasagne dish, any shallow dish would work.

You need:
Yummy savoury bits (caramelised onions, fried bacon, mushrooms... whatever)
4 eggs and 1 extra just in case
Milk
A Ciabatta loaf or other tasty bread product, can be borderline stale.
Butter. Real butter. None of that marge crap.
Salt, pepper, herbs of your choice
Cheese

1. Cook any of the savoury bits that need cooking; soften your leeks or brown your onions, fry your bacon and mushrooms etc.
2. Cut the bread into slices and butter the slices (I only butter one side and I don't go too mad with the butter) and also grease the dish.
3. Arrange the slices in the dish and shove the savoury bits down between the slices.
4. Break 4 eggs into a measuring jug and add roughly half as much milk as you have eggs. (So if your eggs come up to the 100ml mark, top up to 150ml with milk - this isn't an exact science though so just slop in some milk). Beat a little and add your seasonings of choice. Pour this mix over the bread and bits, making sure all the bread gets dampened. If your bread's standing well out of the egginess, mix up a little more with your spare egg and top up.
5. Put it to one side for an hour to soak up all the juices.
6. Top with grated cheese and bake at 180degreesC until the egg is cooked and the top browned. About half an hour.

There are loads of variations you can make with this. Made with brioche it's so sweetly savoury it's wicked. Good quality chunky beefburgers cut up make excellent, if bulky, 'savoury bits' and sometime I'd like to try it with chicken. I bet it would be great with croissants too. A caramelised onion and mushroom version is an extremely tasty veggie meal.

Pagans and Pseudo-Science

Yesterday I went to the Leaping Hare Pagan convention and, apart from my hacking cough, had a nice time. There were just one or two minor niggles and here I want to put a plea out to Pagan speakers:

Steer the fuck clear of science unless you're a scientist. You only make yourself look like an idiot.

When you're talking about some energy you think spiritual entities might feed on, don't choose a well known form of easily detectable energy. Electro-magnetic energy might sound 'woo woo science kewl' to you and anyone who knows eff all about science but to anyone else (even me with my ickle bit of science) it makes you sound crazy.

If you're going to use the structure of the atom/structure of the solar system to make an 'as above, so below' point, you might want to know that electrons don't actually 'orbit' the nucleus in neat little ellipses like planets. In fact, steer clear of subatomic anything if you're doing the 'as above, so below' thing because the whole problem of Quantum science is that 'as above' doesn't work like 'below'.


So please, Pagan speakers either learn your science or steer clear. It's particularly disappointing when the speaker's reasonably credible from a religious point of view.

Oh and I know I broke my own rule because I'm not a scientist either. MrK's a science teacher and a lot of my friends are science types but my own qualifications run to a Physics A-level and occasionally reading New Scientist magazine. But what the hell, I'm not making easily disprovable claims.

So what's with this blogging malarky?

Here I am with this shiny new blog and having a great time talking to myself and a few passers by (and one or two friends who are willing to read my gabblings) and I occasionally have to ask myself

What on earth is the point?

I enjoy writing, so I guess that's a reason.  My creativity does seem to seep out of me in little unfocussed spurts; a bit of blog writing here, half a poem there, a knitted jumper, a sewn bag, a crap drawing of Thor, a necklace and a weed ridden garden. If only I could focus I'd be like some kind of creativity god wizard thing. Or not. 

I am really enjoying this though, the gods only understand why. I thought I didn't care whether anyone read it but my mild (ahem) obsession with the stat page suggests otherwise. Maybe all art only really becomes complete when there's an audience? Art...?! This? Pah *cackle*

So, gentle reader, do you blog? Why the feck do you do it? Egomania? Promoting a business? Because it's more socially acceptable than muttering to oneself?

Two New Necklaces

I have two shiny new necklaces courtesy of Corbin of Splendid Fish Studios. I think I might be a little bit in love with the man and have a little addiction to his jewellery. Just a litte one.

First up is the Mask of the Crow I comissioned:

I call him Corvy and he sits just at the base of my neck on a fairly short chain.

Next was a wonderful surprise. My enamelled flutterby:

 

 Corbin's work is just awesome. I wonder how long I can hold out this time before I crack and have to get some more?

Slice of Springtime Heaven

This was a good chunk of yesterday afternoon:

That's a pile of my favourite veg and herb gardening books, tea and some lovely March sunshine. I've not been quite 100% and had spent a good chunk of the morning cooking and knew I was in for a late night. So decided it was in my best interests to chill out, rather than getting stuck into the garden. A good couple of hours later and I had a list of herbs to grow, along with lists of plants and seeds to buy and bits that needed moving in the garden, and a little plan of the herb beds.  

The books are:

Food from Your Garden by Reader's Digest which is my bible of veg gardening. My parents had it as I grew up and I snapped up a copy from a charity shop. It's old fashioned and fantastic with lovely illustrations. It also assumes you have at least as much space as a full size allotment and says amusing things like 'for a family of four, two 12ft rows should be sufficient'. I love it.

Organic Kitchen and Garden by Ysanne Spevack, Christine Lavelle and Michael Lavelle. A great book which is half gardening, half cooking. The gardening section has a lot of general info on organic methods plus directories of veg, fruit and herbs with cultivation requirements, timings, spacings etc. The book I usually go to first. 


Allotment Month by Month by Alan Buckingham. To be honest all the info in this book is in the others, in fact they have more info, but I bought it because of its month-by-month arrangement which makes organising myself that bit easier. 


Grow your own Drugs by James Wong which is a fun book I still haven't made anything from. 


Jekka's Complete Herb Book by Jekka McVicar which is my herb bible. There's no magical information, obviously, but otherwise it's just great for someone like me who dabbles - I don't need great textbooks of info and Jekka strikes a good balance here. I can see how a dabbler like me could get by with only this one book. Obviously it isn't my only book as I'm a bit of a book fiend, but since I bought it, it's often the only one I open.

Hrethe

It's a glorious spring day and I'm sat on my doorstep peering at my screen because I'm determined to write this outside in the lovely weather but the sun is making that rather difficult. All it needs is a glass of Pimms and it might be June. Ok maybe not June... but the point is that Spring has most definitely sprung. This evening I shall be going to Wuffacynn's Hrethe Blot so i thought I'd find out a little about Hrethe, a goddess I know little about.

It turns out that one of the main reasons I know so little about her is there isn't much to know.

Simek, in his Dictionary of Northern Mythology writes:

"Hrethe or Hretha  (OE 'the famous', 'the victorious'). The eponymous goddess of the OE name of the month Hredemonath (=March) mentioned by Bede in his De Temporibus Ratione. An OHG female personal name Hruada tempted J. Grimm to connect the name with ON hrothr 'fame'; thus the goddess could have a similar meaning to the eponymous Roman god of the same month, Mars."

So as a goddess linked to March she is associated with the burgeoning of fresh growth for modern Heathens and may also have a warrior goddess aspect.

This lack of information is going to make finding good toasts for the sumble difficult!